ITHACA — Cayuga Medical Center at Ithaca fired two nurses in an effort to end a unionizing drive, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge has ruled, ordering the hospital to rehire the nurses and reimburse them for back pay and related expenses.

The hospital plans to appeal, it told CNYBJ in an emailed statement. “Cayuga Medical Center strongly disagrees with the ruling by the National Labor Relations Board. Patient safety has always been at the forefront of delivering high quality care to our patients. We have always maintained a supportive workplace for our employees, as we partner together to deliver patient care. We will be appealing the ruling.”

The hospital says it fired registered nurses Ann Marshall and Loran Lamb in 2016 after the two failed to follow written procedures for a blood transfusion. But NLRB Administrative Law Judge Kimberly Sorg-Graves contended in her decision that the hospital’s given reason was “a ruse for its real motivation of removing Marshall’s vocal support for unionization.”

Sorg-Graves said Marshall was recognized by the hospital as the lead organizer attempting to bring union representation to hospital staffers. She placed notices on bulletin boards in the hospital and expressed support for a union on social media. 

Written procedures at Cayuga Medical Center at Ithaca require that before any patient is given a blood transfusion, two nurses must check to confirm the blood to be delivered and the patient are properly identified and that the check must be done at the patient’s bedside.

In September 2016, Marshall performed a blood transfusion on a patient without a second nurse present at the bedside, according to the court decision. Instead, Marshall and Lamb had checked the blood against the patient’s paperwork at the nurses’ station before Marshall proceeded to the patient’s room and performed the transfusion by herself.

The patient, who had received transfusions 11 times prior, noticed procedure wasn’t followed and spoke up. She later emailed the hospital about the matter, saying she asked Marshall, “What about the protocol?”

Sorg-Graves said this violation did not warrant firing Marshall or Lamb. Citing testimony by other nurses and emails from hospital officials, she said the protocol was not followed all the time.

One hospital email she quoted in the ruling said of nurses, “They are clearly teaching each other short-cuts.” Another email in the chain, from an administrative director said, “these dangerous shortcuts are more commonplace than we’d like to think. We see it in our own lab processes.”

Despite this, officials who testified on the matter said they found no evidence other nurses failed to perform bedside checks. Sorg-Graves said she gave no credit to those claims.

Sorg-Graves went so far as to say she found Cayuga Medical Center (CMC) officials’ claims to be very upset with the severity of the protocol breach to be “contrived.” 

She singled out Karen Ames, the hospital’s chief patient safety officer and director of quality and patient safety, asking why Ames didn’t follow up on information from other nurses who said the two-nurse bedside check wasn’t always performed. “Not only did she fail to investigate those claims more, she prevented others in her department from investigating further or doing more to educate the staff on the proper procedures. These are not the actions of an individual who is motivated by a dire safety concern.” 

In her ruling, Sorg-Graves said while Marshall was let go because of the hospital opposition to her unionizing activities, Lamb was “simply a casualty of circumstances.” 

“CMC disparately treated Marshall and by necessity Lamb to support its termination of Marshall,” Sorg-Graves wrote.

The judge ordered Marshall and Lamb be reinstated, compensated for back pay, and that their employee files be purged of any reference to their suspensions or termination. Further, she ordered CMC to display for 60 days a notice telling employees they have protected rights to take part in union activities and outlining, point by point, what the hospital is doing to reinstate and reimburse Marshall and Lamb.

UTICA, N.Y. — Mohawk Valley Health System (MVHS) is renaming its long-term care and subacute rehabilitation center.

St. Luke’s Home is now MVHS Rehabilitation and Nursing Center (RNC), the nonprofit health-care system said in a news release issued Jan. 15. 

The New York State Department of Health Bureau of Nursing Home Licensure and Certification sent approval documents to MVHS officials. 

MVHS is an affiliation of Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare and St. Elizabeth Medical Center (SEMC), both of Utica. The two organizations teamed up in March 2014.

MVHS Rehabilitation and Nursing Center remains in the same facility located in the Center for Rehabilitation and Continuing Care Services building on the St. Luke’s campus at 1650 Champlin Ave. in Utica.

At the same time, St. Luke’s Home Adult Day Health Care will now be titled MVHS Adult Day Health Care (ADHC). MVHS ADHC offers health care with therapeutic social, educational, and recreational activities. It is a medical-model program, operated under the supervision of a registered nurse, the organization said. 

“Not only do the new names bring cohesiveness and better name recognition to the organization, it better reflects what the center does extremely well – rehabilitation,” Scott Perra, president and CEO of MVHS, contended in the release. “Those coming to MVHS Rehabilitation and Nursing Center receive quality, rehabilitation services and return home once their health improves. We also continue our commitment to those who need long-term care services in a home-like setting.”

MVHS Rehabilitation and Nursing Center is a 202-bed facility with a 40-bed subacute rehabilitation unit. Its services include coordinated inpatient rehabilitation and long-term and continuing-care services for the community.

“We want to more readily be identified as an affiliate of the Mohawk Valley Health System. This name change also reflects our strengths in the changing, senior healthcare environment,” Mike McCoy, executive director of MVHS Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, added.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com

DICKINSON — Syracuse Behavioral Healthcare is expanding into Broome County, recruiting staff to run a new 50-bed facility serving those with substance-abuse issues.

The center, in what had been Building 1 of the Broome Developmental Center in Dickinson, will open in April to serve as a medically supervised treatment center for patients with substance-abuse disorders, Kathleen Gaffney-Babb, SBH’s executive VP and chief operating officer, tells CNYBJ. 

“There will be 50 beds of medically supervised withdrawal,” Gaffney-Babb says. 

“It’s what many people think of as detox,” she says. That means some patients may arrive intoxicated or suffering from withdrawal symptoms requiring medication. 

After treatment that averages three to five days, patients will be linked to the appropriate care, she adds. 

To run the facility, SBH has started recruiting a new staff of 49, everything from doctors, psychiatrists, registered nurses and LPNs to directors, property maintenance workers and a receptionist. Gaffney-Babb says the plan is to staff the center with hires from Broome and surrounding counties, rather than bring staff in from SBH facilities in Syracuse and elsewhere.

SBH, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, operates 25-bed medically supervised treatment centers in Syracuse and Rochester. It also provides out-patient treatment for substance-abuse disorders, mental-health diagnosis, and problem gambling. The agency, headquartered in Crossroads Park in Salina, was founded in 1920 and has more than 350 employees and lists 10 doctors on its website.

SBH’s stated mission is: “To promote recovery from the effects of substance use and mental health disorders and other behavioral health issues.”

The nonprofit, “helped 5,441 begin a life of recovery in the last year,” according to the SBH website.

The need for a medically supervised treatment center for patients with substance-abuse disorders in Broome County was clear enough that the county put out a request for proposals to organizations able to handle the work, Gaffney-Babb explains. SBH applied and will lease the building, a residential facility that has been vacant for some time, and operate it with funding from the state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, she says.

The facility will be able to treat those with different substance-abuse issues, but Gaffney-Babb says awareness of the current opioid-abuse crisis was a catalyst for development of the facility. Broome County opioid-involved deaths were up by at least 50 percent in the first half of this decade, according to statistics from the county website.

SBH held an information session for prospective employees on Jan. 18 at the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in Binghamton.

Broome-Tioga Workforce will be holding a career fair Jan. 25 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Jeffrey P. Kraham Broome County Library in Binghamton. Health-care employers, including SBH, will be participating and conducting on-site interviews.